This has been a strange summer. Whether you're following the weather, current events, or the economy, a lot of unusual things are happening.
For instance, here in Austin, Texas, we usually face weeks and weeks of 100+ degree temperatures all throughout June, July, and August. Yet, this year it's been a very mild summer, with only 1 day of 100+ degree temperatures for the entire month of July so far.
When wildcards like this come your way, all you can do is adapt and find ways to enjoy it. That might require some creativity, but it's a great skill to build to navigate the inevitable ups and downs of life.
In today’s edition, we cover the nuance of integrity and loyalty on your teams, reflect on whether employee engagement actually matters as a metric, and share a long read on some of the best leadership lessons you can learn from Steve Jobs.
Let’s dive in…
Table of contents:
- 🥘 Food for Thought on Integrity vs. Loyalty.
- 📰 News & Reports for Managers on Does Employee Engagement Matter?
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🥘 Food for Thought
This is a great point, but very difficult for many in practice. It's a major ego hit to have a subordinate call out something wrong ("challenge orders"), especially if it was your decision.
To humble yourself & accept it is long term empowering, but hurts in the short term. Many avoid that pain.
What do you value in your team?
No, not hypothetically, but what you really value. Remember: what you value is what you recognize and reward, not what you imagine.
So ask yourself:
- When you promoted someone recently: What were the traits and results you intended to reward?
- For that same person: What did they do that may be a weakness they have, that others might think were rewarded too? Have you done anything to make clear that's not why they were promoted?
- What behaviors and actions do you go out of your way to praise? What values should you start taking the time to actively recognize and reward?
- What value(s) do you want to add or start implementing on your team? How can you demonstrate them yourself? How can you recognize and reward them when you see them on your team?
The first step towards having integrity is knowing what you stand for.
The second step in having integrity is actually standing for it consistently.
Integrity is easier said than done.
Living your life with integrity is hard. It requires you to hold yourself to a high standard at all times. Exceptions are exactly what makes your team roll their eyes and feel you're hypocritical.
Integrity is easy when everything is going well, but that's not when it counts.
It really comes into play when times get tough:
- Do you admit when you're wrong?
- Do you still take care of people, even when it hurts?
- Do you keep your word, even if it will cost you in some way?
- Will you stick to your standards or values when it will cost you or the company money or a milestone?
These are not easy questions. And they can get downright murky when they may conflict with each other.
For example, what if your company swore it would never do business with a certain industry, but doing so would bring in revenue that would keep you from having to lay off 5 people?
I don't have an easy answer for situations like that, but you're on the road to integrity if you take the time to truly grapple with questions like this, instead of simply taking the path of least resistance.
Remember: Hypocrisy destroys integrity.
We mentioned it briefly already, and it bears repeating: if your team thinks you're hypocritical, any sense of integrity goes with it.
And they're always watching.
I'm not sure if it's something deeply embedded in human nature, but I've found virtually every team I've interacted with has been a bloodhound for hypocrisy. That means that if you bend or break your rules, your team will know it, and they will judge you for it.
So do yourself a favor, and don't give them any ammo.
Hold yourself to the standards and values you set out, and if your team catches you or calls you out, admit your mistake and fix it as quickly as you can. It may hurt at the time, but it will pay huge dividends long term.
Integrity creates loyalty.
The really great thing about integrity is that it's not on an island separate from loyalty. In fact, it creates loyalty.
When you make the hard decisions, and stick to your values or live with integrity, people really notice. In fact, they often remember for *years* after.
A few examples:
- A former coworker had a colleague die suddenly in a tragic accident. The company helped pay for the funeral, went out of their way to recognize them, and even set aside money to help the colleague's children go to college. My coworker was still raving about it years later.
- Steve Wozniak didn't like that Steve Jobs refused to give some employees equity pre-IPO. Woz stepped in and literally gave them some of his equity, because Steve couldn't stop that. Those employees still remembered that gesture decades later, recalling it in a documentary millions of people watched.
- My father trusted his employees (accountants) to get their work done, and make their own decisions on the hours they kept. When an employee asked to take time off for a family cruise in the middle of tax season, he let them go on the condition they finished their taxes first. They did, and the cruise was that last time him and his children saw their aging father before he passed. He ended up working at my father's company for over 20 years in total.
None of the decisions above were easy. It costs a significant amount of time, money, and effort to support an employee's family after they died. Woz gave up his own money to take care of others, and my father risked having tax season messed up harming the business and clients.
Integrity is the ultimate skin in the game, but requires courage and consistency.
Take some time to ponder this weekend two important questions:
- Do you care more about loyalty or integrity?
- Do you live with integrity, and if so, what are the values you stand for?
📰 News & Reports for Managers
📌 Does Employee Engagement matter?
Long time friend of the blog and leadership coach / author Mark C Crowley raises a good question in his recent piece in Fast Company:
"..as a leadership consultant, I have found that very few organizations actually take employee engagement seriously. It’s time leaders admit it.
The moment has come when leaders must stop pretending we care about engagement. Let’s quit asking workers to fill out surveys that everyone knows are insincere, “check-the-box” activities. Instead, leaders should start dedicating resources to not only measuring employee well-being, but actually committing to improving employee well-being."
Mark makes a pretty compelling case. As he rightly points out: engagement numbers haven't really changed in over a decade. They largely fluctuate within a pretty similar range.
That means one of two things:
- A) Engagement scores are difficult to change despite great effort from companies.
- B) Companies aren't trying to change their engagement scores, because they aren't motivated to, or don't see the ROI in it.
Beware the vicious cycle.
Mark shares a vicious cycle I've also seen play out at many companies when it comes to pulse, culture, and engagement surveys:
"...employees were generally surveyed no more than twice a year. Results often took months to be distributed to managers and poor scores were never assigned to a specific person to fix.
Neither manager performance reviews nor their compensation was ever tied to improving engagement.Ultimately, workers themselves grew to believe the survey process was a complete joke, leading many to conclude their employers really didn’t care about their feelings and concerns at all.
Ironically, this perceived indifference led people to becoming even less engaged in their jobs."
This is a death spiral that too many companies fall into, where they mistake a little effort for positive action. Yet, from the employee's perspective, it comes off as half-hearted at best.
Well-being is really about belonging.
Mark makes the case that "well-being" is what companies should be measuring instead. And the top aspect of well-being that seems to matter most fits squarely in the control of managers like you:
"The greatest driver of employee well-being is belonging. This is, a sense that one’s organization, manager, and colleagues care about them personally. Meeting worker’s social needs for friendship, connection, and feeling appreciated is what truly elevates well-being."
This makes a lot of sense when you realize that this is closely related to two terms we talk about often: Rapport and Psychological Safety, which both have their share of research and support.
The ROI of Well-being.
There is a lot of great data Mark shares in his post and the one that stands out most explains how caring about well-being actually mattered when they measured the impact with call center employees:
"De Neve [a researcher] found that weekly productivity was directly related to how workers felt in any week. As an economist, De Neve later proved that traditional financial impacts like return on assets, profits, and a firm’s value also have a direct and positive correlation to employee well-being."
The Truth: Terminology is irrelevant. It's the managers!
As the saying goes, "People leave managers, not companies." However you want to slice it, your relationship with and the behaviors of your manager has the biggest impact on your work satisfaction and productivity.
And that helps explain why employee engagement and well-being scores have their struggles when it comes to having a real impact. As Mark puts it:
"The root causes of failing [well-being] programs also prove to be the very same issues that derailed efforts to improve employee engagement: no structural change in managerial practices, inconsequential low-level perks provided as a cure-all, and the magical thinking that simply by tracking how people feel will somehow fix every issue."
The truth is, most companies only care about their goals, profits, and desired outcomes. And in a healthy, capitalistic society, a lot of that is necessary and valuable.
It also means that the only way companies will pay attention and do something about well-being or employee engagement is when they see how efforts in those areas contribute back to those goals, profits, and desired outcomes. Connecting the dots there often requires multiple steps, which muddies the waters and makes it easier to not bother with.
That's why we always try to tie our work back to what YOU can control, which is your own behaviors and actions.
Yes, sometimes stats on things like employee engagement and well-being help contribute to the points we make, but we don't base our entire case upon it.
Instead we focus on the fundamental habits that we know can make a difference for you and your team, regardless of how you measure them.
So employee engagement probably isn't going away, and well-being is likely to be measured for the foreseeable future, too.
Yet, what really matters is focusing on the actions you can control and using the power of your own observation to determine the habits, values, and actions you believe make a difference, and then sticking to them.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your team and your leadership of them?
You can read Mark's full piece with more research and data around well-being and employee engagement here.
📖 Your Leadership Long Read on Leadership Traits from Steve Jobs worth emulating
Steve Jobs is a complicated leader. If you've read his biographies or watched any of the movies or documentaries about him, you know he was no saint.
Yet, in totality, Jobs deserves credit for transforming an industry and saving a company (actually more than one if you include his funding of and work with Pixar).
Unfortunately, too often I see people lionize him, either dismissing that he had any negative traits, or foolishly thinking things like his brash, sometimes obnoxious criticism was a strength. I cringe every time I see a young entrepreneur try to be like that, thinking it's the key to Apple's success.
That's why this newsletter has featured a number of leadership lessons from Jobs; I want to highlight the real things he did that truly did contribute to his success. Because it's in understanding the nuance of our heroes that we learn the right lessons from them.
In this week's post, we have 5 great examples of Steve Jobs at his best as a leader to help you learn some of those traits you may want to add to your own leadership habits and skills.
